Rosenborg

130 HISTORY OF ROSENBORG CASTLE whole history is more dramatic than has been thought; to this conclusion we are now able to come after a more pro­ found study of the sources and after the investigations — including excavations — that we have made. II Being alive to the possibilities of the future extension of the city of Copenhagen, Christian the Fourth in the year 1606 purchased forty-one private gardens of various sizes outside the city's northeast boundary; some of these gardens he made into one large p le a s u re ga rden , where he at once bu ilt himself a small castle or „summer house“ . In the accounts of the paymasters this building is mostly called „the large new house in His Royal Majesty's Pleasure-Garden outside the c ity “ . I t was practically completed in 1607. We see it as a fa irly high house, w ith an octagonal tower w ith a winding staircase in the middle of the west front, drawn in the distance on Johannes v. W ick's view of Copenhagen, engraved by Jan Direchsen „1611“ (the National Museum's Antiquarian-Topographical Archives), a part of which is re­ produced on page 13. The drawing does not show the east foursided projection. From the paymasters's accounts, in which there are re­ cords both of the contracts and of the payments to the craftsmen, we learn to know this first „summer house“ . It was brick bu ilt, and it had, as already said, both a stair tower — for which four hundred square corner stones were